


Backwards Darling

by deifiliaa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Memory Loss (of Sorts), Minor Cho Chang/Cedric Diggory, mostly just an excuse to write cedric diggory tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:08:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26787958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deifiliaa/pseuds/deifiliaa
Summary: They’re not just daydreams, and he gets that sense of déjà vu, more than anything, whenever these episodes come on.It goes on like this, action and reaction, for weeks.
Relationships: Cho Chang/Cedric Diggory
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	Backwards Darling

He wakes with a start, chest heaving and beads of sweat trickling down the slopes of his temples.

Already, the details of his dream (nightmare?) are slipping away, and Cedric exhales, screwing his eyes shut, trying to grasp at the things he can remember before he forgets them indefinitely.

Green. He remembers a lot of green, toward the end. Just before waking.

He pulls himself to sitting, blinking into the semi-darkness of his bedroom, and when he glances down at the clenched fist of his wand hand—

_Wand hand?_

Cedric blinks, like he doesn’t know where that phrase comes from, but he recognizes when he’s missing something, like he’d recently _held_ something important. A lifeline. He relaxes his grip and stares at the lines of his open palm, closes his fist again, tries to figure out why there seems to be that feeling of lacking.

Had he been holding his mobile in his sleep?

There are dreams that are realistic, and then there are dreams that _feel real_ , like he’s actually physically in them, like they’re one of his younger cousin Colin’s virtual reality games, but… much more emphasis on the _reality_ bit, for sure.

He inhales sharply and looks around the room, wondering why there’s that prickling at the base of his neck, reminding him in a telltale way that he’s forgetting something.

The LED lights glare at him. _6:24 AM._

His green Devon rugby kit, hanging under the knob of his wardrobe, catches the red glow from his alarm clock.

His neighbor’s mastiff is barking in the other yard.

Everything’s where it should be. _Everything’s where it should be._

His breathing settles, resumes a normal pace, and he dozes off, propped up against the headboard in the next half hour before his alarm’s meant to set off, his dream becoming little more than a memory.

* * *

Not quite, though.

No, not quite a _memory_ , because from that day on, Cedric starts experiencing them. Flashes— a lot of green, always— of black robes and teeming greenhouses and something like _merfolk_ and what looks like a sunny, homey living room beyond precisely stacked crates and barrels. They’re not just daydreams, and he gets that sense of déjà vu, more than anything, whenever these episodes come on.

Like he’s seen it all before.

Like he’s _lived_ it all before.

It’ll be the strangest thing— like a pair of weathered gardening gloves beside a stout potted orchid at the corner market— that sets off his flashes. With that particular example, the face of a kindly woman with a funny pointed hat had materialized into view, her hands swallowed up by thick, patched, heavy-duty gloves, and she’d slowly lifted a shriveled _infant_ , premature and screaming, out of _soil_ —

The neighbor’s dog reminds him of a labrador retriever and the feeling of a particularly nasty burn on the left side of his face. 

Sometimes, he’ll have a taste of something, whatever it is— an empanada from the Chilean vendor in town, or the marshmallow jellybeans the eight-year-old down the street offers and he can’t refuse without coming off as inconsiderate, or drinks that he and the lads enjoy after their win over the Exeter club— and he’ll get that splitting migraine feeling, then that sudden green flash, and then that reminder of something familiar and… alternate, in a way.

The flaky crust of pumpkin pasty in a train compartment he doesn’t recognize, with some mates he doesn’t recognize.

A sour jellybean that makes his face screw up and his stomach flip, because it’s _bile_ flavored, definitely, _augh_ , _disgusting._

A crowd of scraped-up teens, athletic-looking, dressed in foreign padding and black and yellow uniforms, cheering him on and hollering and clapping him on the back for _taking one for the team,_ that’s _our captain,_ that’s _our Ced!_ —and feeling as if his own tankard should taste sweeter, like it’s missing butterscotch, maybe, when he downs the last of it.

It goes on like this, action and reaction, for weeks.

It drives him mad that he can’t seem to figure out what’s going on, and it drives him over the edge that all of it remains so intimate, like he’s looking at a filmstrip of life through the lenses of someone else’s eyes, but he doesn’t _know_ anybody in these stolen, private moments.

He quietly shoulders all of his frustration, though.

Mum would assume the worst and dote on him as if he’d come down with something, if she knew, and he wouldn’t want Dad to be distracted from his big work project to worry over him, like he knows Dad would. His best mates aren’t exactly the brightest help, as much as he loves them like the brothers he never had. (Idiots, the lot of them. He’d still take a bullet for any one of them, though.)

So he continues going about his flash-green life, learning to cope with it and leaving it as the eternal mystery it is.

* * *

It’s all very anticlimactic.

Or it would be, if he’d never discovered that people— _strangers_ , apparently— seem to have the greatest likelihood of catalyzing an episode.

* * *

A tall, pointed-face boy in a passing metro carriage reminds him of hooded figures and a courtyard ferret.

A dark-skinned, willowy woman jogging past him brings flashes of red and gold athletic uniforms, deep-chested laughter from a set of redhead twins, and broomsticks that fly around an ovular field.

He nearly knocks into a skinny, messy-haired boy one morning, in his rush into the underground, and when Cedric rights himself and manages to throw his hand out to keep the boy from stumbling over the steps, it takes one glance and—

The combination of round, black frames and bright, green eyes gives him his worst flash in three weeks.

“Er— sorry,” the boy mutters, still and studying and maybe _recognizing_ for a moment, before his watch beeps something important and he’s nodding tersely and breaking off, rushing in strides up the remaining steps.

More green this time, but murkier, the color of algae, and then Cedric sure as hell doesn’t expect to see tombstones and a looming mausoleum when he flashes again, the same messy-haired and innocent-faced boy from two seconds ago holding a stick in his hand and whipping toward Cedric, like something had been about to happen, and then there had been another splitting sensation—

Anyway, he definitively decides that green is his least favorite color.

* * *

A few weeks go by since that incident, and Cedric’s life returns to a state of semi-normalcy, considering he’s probably encountered most everything there is that makes him flash.

He’s fine.

Relatively unharmed.

Mostly forgets about this weird stage in his life until the man who reaches for the same loaf of split-top honey wheat bread stares at him when Cedric stumbles back during a particularly bad flash, and the man— whose sallowness might look sickly on anyone else but which Cedric takes to be an indicator of _survival_ — how does he know that?— pauses. There’s a furrow evident between his brows.

“Are you fine?” Gruffly, quietly, _tenderly_ , it sounds like. 

Cedric sucks in a breath and nods, still overcoming the image of great fur robes and an equally great, if not more impressively so, ship on the banks of some lake. A glimpse of towering hedges and then the red glare of electricity, of _betrayal_ , all over his body—

“Yeah,” Cedric grunts, nodding again. “Yeah, I’m… I’m fine.”

The man blinks and appraises Cedric carefully, the crease above the bridge of his nose deepening, and for a brief moment, Cedric questions the twinge of animosity in this particular flash.

“I am not thinking you are fine.”

And okay, no, Cedric’s not fine, but he’s tired of not knowing what it is that’s happening to him, and he’s tired of the strange looks that all these strangers have given him every time he reacts the way he does. Cedric just shakes his head and smiles. “Just a small headache, thanks.”

And so it goes, life, in that way, for the next few weeks. Months.

* * *

A few years, until the flashes have gotten to a point of near-extinction— just an occasional headache, usually when he’s out and about— and the biggest thing on his mind becomes getting through his final exams in his final year at uni.

Some mates tell him to check out the law faculty’s library— “it’s designed to be, like, old and ancient-looking which, you know, really boosts overall studying morale”— so he does, and when he edges past a narrow line of bookshelves and turns the corner, he runs into something small.

Some _one_ small.

“Ow! _Ooh_ , that’s— sorry about th—”

A stern shushing from the occupied carrel beside them.

His casualty— a short, petite girl with long, black hair and a smattering of faint freckles over her nose— shuts up at once and promptly goes red in the face.

But Cedric doesn’t notice, really, because he flashes, for the first time in three years, and he _knows this girl_ , or he _should_ know her, because the images that he glimpses are of an entire history that strangers don’t have the privilege of knowing intimately, so he _urges_ his mind to remember, to wrack up why _this one_ is so important, and _why can’t he just remember_ —

“Headache?” she supplies in a whisper, almost knowing, judging the way he has to lean against an encyclopedia set of Indigenous treaties for support.

Cedric blinks, screws his eyes shut, presses his fingers to his eyelids. The flash that he gets seems to flit through a series of images this time— not just one or two, like the usual— and each one brings about that frustrating sense of _almost_ , like he’s _so close_ to knowing what all of this is.

Images of walking around a quaint street of shoppes; of seeing her in a hospital bed with her arm all bandaged up; of trying to concentrate on a textbook but it’s difficult because she’s sitting across from him; of walking side-by-side in a crowded corridor of young faces, his arm itching to drape itself over her shoulder; of a fancy silver dress that catches the shimmer of fairy lights overhead; of a private kiss under mistletoe, and in the alcove of a tower, and when she’s greeting him outside of a classroom, blushing madly, radiantly; of her, deathly still and deathly pale, floating underwater; of a vibrant, fragrant dish she excitedly, expectantly, puts before him, waiting for him to try; of the frustrated arch in her brow when she rereads and flags a particular text; of a final kiss and well-wishing of good luck right before an _ancient_ -looking man ushers him aside.

His head hurts.

His chest does, too.

“Feeling all right?” she asks, voice hushed, concern drawing up in her features, and he steadies himself, turning toward her.

“Yeah, yeah… I’m all right.”

She studies him for a moment, not at all unlike the boy from the station or the man from the bakery, before she digs into her bag for a small, red-capped bottle. “Aspirin,” she says simply, with a friendly nod. “Might help.”

He politely declines and thanks her anyway, telling her that it’ll soon pass, and she pauses for a second, something on the tip of her tongue, before she returns the bottle to her bag. “Take care of yourself, yeah?” she says, adjusting the strap of her bag. “Finals season isn’t exactly unrelenting, and we haven’t even started yet.”

He gets the feeling that she’s said the same thing to him once, before, in an altogether different ancient library.

“You, too, er—”

She smiles— dizzying, really— and his stomach goes into knots. “Cho.”

“ _Cho_ ,” he repeats thoughtfully, appreciating the earlier pain subsiding so that he can meet her in relative peace. “Nice to meet you, Cho.”

He offers his hand, which she takes in her too-small one. “Cedric,” he returns.

For a moment, she looks as if she might say something else, but she just drops her hand back to her side and nods at him, lifting her chin to motion to a section of crowded carrels behind him. “I’ve got a friend to meet, and he gets impatient when I keep him waiting too long, but”—there’s that smile again, lurching his gut forward—“it was nice to meet you, too, Cedric. Maybe I’ll run into you again soon.”

Cho pauses, face screwed up as she reconsiders her words. “Er— hopefully not so literally the next time.”

He grins and lets her pass, and he wonders about her, about the flash, as he stares and tries to make sense of who she could possibly be—

She turns, one last look at him, the swish of her jet-black hair reminding him of how she’d often teasingly flown before him on the Quidditch Pitch, always just out of reach, a beckon, a _challenge_ , and—

And he remembers everything.

**Author's Note:**

> what can i say— i'm weak for the concept that is cho chang and her all-magical, all-healing, universe-correcting smile.
> 
> i'd written the original version of this a little while ago, completely forgot that i wrote it, found it again, and revised it for publishing here.  
> (cho chang and cedric diggory deserved all the world's happiness, thanks!)


End file.
